BDO Treasure Codex guide 2026: the 20-week infinite potion, and which treasures to skip

A checklist where there used to be a wiki

On September 23, 2026 Pearl Abyss added the Treasure Codex to Black Desert, and it is one of those additions that looks like a UI convenience and is actually a content change. Treasures are the longest grinds in the game - Pearl Abyss's own Adventurer's Guide says gathering the materials for a single one may take months - and until this patch there was no in-game way to see what treasures existed, what they needed, or where any of it dropped. You read a wiki, you kept a spreadsheet, or you guessed.

The Codex lives at Menu (ESC) then Adventure (F5), the same Adventure menu that holds the Adventure Logs. It lists the treasures including their Masterpiece Quests, and for each one it shows the crafting materials, how to obtain them, and the monster zones the materials drop in. Completed treasures are drawn in full colour while the rest sit dimmed, which is a small thing that does a surprising amount of motivational work.

That last row is the one people miss. Allan Serbin's Landscape is the item that displays monster zone information, and the Codex added a button to it - so if you already use landscapes to decide where to grind, the treasure materials for that zone are now one click away. It quietly turns a grind-spot picker into a treasure-hunting picker, and it is the single most useful thing in the patch for anyone mid-project.

The bar counts the drops you cannot buy

Read the patch note carefully, because the Codex progress figure is narrower than it looks. Progress is calculated from the key crafting materials you own. Not all materials - key ones.

For the infinite potions that means the three rare monster drops. For Lafi Bedmountain's Upgraded Compass it means the three compass parts. Every gem - Crimson Ruby, Aquatic Sapphire, Gold Topaz, Glowing Green Emerald, Star Diamond - is purchasable on the Central Market and is therefore excluded from the count. So is the Yaz's Combinables Pouch itself, the Everlasting Water, and every quest-gated exchange item.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: a Codex bar at 0% does not mean you have nothing. A player who has bought all four gems for the Archaeologist's Map and none of the map fragments sees the same screen as a player who has never opened the treasure UI at all. The Codex is a rare-drop tracker wearing a progress bar, not a completion estimator. It will never tell you how much time is left. It only tells you how much of the part you cannot buy is done.

The Codex bar counts the drops you cannot buy. It will read 0% while your inventory is full of everything else.

That is not a complaint. For a treasure like the infinite potion, where the hard part is exactly the three rare drops, the bar is honest and useful. For a treasure like Star of Nostos, where the hard part is 6,000 gathering procs and the Codex counts a handful of materials, the bar is nearly decorative. Knowing which of those two you are looking at is the whole skill.

Ten treasures, ten different kinds of gate

The Adventurer's Guide's treasure page is one long list, and the gate on each item is different in kind rather than just in length. Some are pure RNG. Some are quest lines. One is a horse-breeding project in disguise. Here is the roster with the gate named honestly, because the Codex will show you the requirements and will not tell you which ones are the wall.

Two things jump out once that table is written down. First, only two of the ten are worth anything to a player who is not already committed to a specific activity - the rest are quality of life for sailing, horse training or gathering, or they are pure flex. Second, three of the ten have a second gate that is not a drop at all. The Rich Merchant's Ring has no published recipe. The Lumaloft Lamp's Lumentrace comes only from delivering Imperial Steeds, which you cannot buy. And Star of Nostos is a gathering career wearing a treasure's name.

Star of Nostos deserves its own paragraph, because the arithmetic is brutal in a way the Codex will not show you. Each of the six higher-tier materials - Terrashard, Eonwood Round, Essence of Life, Heartvein Crystal, Wildsoul, Naturewoven Hide - is made by Simple Alchemy from 1,000 of one specific gathering drop plus 100 Essence of Nature. That is 6,000 gathering procs spread across hoe gathering, lumbering, fluid collecting, mining, butchering and tanning, on top of 600 Essence of Nature. The reward is a teleport to your residence with a 30-minute cooldown. It is a genuinely pleasant item. It is not 6,000 gathering procs pleasant for most players.

The infinite potions are the only ones with a floor

Everything above is a reason to be selective. This is the reason to start one specific project today.

Ornette's Spirit Essence and Odore's Spirit Essence are the only treasures in Black Desert with a pity mechanic, and it is generous in a way that is easy to miss. Six weekly quests each hand you five pity pieces of one specific material, and 100 pity pieces of a type can be crafted into the full material. So the drop you have been farming for eight months has a hard ceiling - 100 pity pieces, no RNG involved, and the pity pieces are the guaranteed part.

All six reset every Thursday at 00:00 UTC, and the Adventurer's Guide is explicit that you can complete all of them in the same week. Atanis' Element is the accelerator: it drops in Polly's Forest, Traitor's Graveyard, Desert Naga Temple, Titium Valley, Mirumok Ruins, Bashim Base, Cadry Ruins, Crescent Shrine, Fadus Habitat and Protty Cave, and can be exchanged one-for-one at Merindora in Grana for a pity piece of your choice. That matters because several of the weekly quest zones - Navarn Steppe in particular - pay badly per hour, and Atanis' Element lets you farm a spot you actually want to be in and still make progress.

There is also a route most guides bury: you do not have to wait for the finished potion. Craft a Blessed Spirit Essence from your first core material plus Everlasting Water from Merindora, then a Greater Blessed Spirit Essence with your second, and convert to the finished Ornette's Spirit Essence with the third. The lesser versions heal less, but they are permanent and weightless, and if you build the wrong one you can Simple Alchemy it back into its materials. Partial progress on this treasure is playable. Nothing else in the Codex works that way, and it is the strongest argument for starting here rather than anywhere else.

Twenty weeks, and the kill count behind it

Now put the pity pieces on a calendar. Each Spirit Essence needs three farmable materials at 100 pity pieces each, so one potion is 300 pity pieces. Three of the six weekly quests feed Ornette's, three feed Odore's, and each hands over five pieces.

That table is the entire argument for running all six quests. Focusing on one potion does not get you that potion any faster, because the two quest sets draw on separate materials and therefore do not compete. Twenty weeks of questing buys you both infinite potions, or one, depending on whether you spent an extra hour a week. There is no trade-off to weigh. If you are doing the weekly quests at all, do all six.

The kill count is the other half of the number. All six quests require 1,000 + 1,000 + 1,500 + 1,000 + 1,500 + 250 monsters, which is 6,250 kills a week. Community kill-rate estimates for these mid-tier Kamasylvia and Drieghan zones run around 2,000 to 3,000 kills per hour at appropriate AP, which puts the weekly requirement at roughly two to three hours. Over 20 weeks that is somewhere between 40 and 60 hours of ordinary grinding for two permanent, weightless, Family-bound potions that you will still be using in three years. Those kill-rate figures are community estimates rather than published numbers - your own rate depends on class, AP and whether you are running drop-rate buffs - but the order of magnitude is the point.

Two caveats the Codex does not surface. First, the pity system covers the three rare drops and nothing else. Musical Spirit's Sound Stone still costs 300 Peridot Leaf and Gayak's Courage Stone still costs 30 Garmoth's Scale. The scales are the easy half: they drop from ordinary monsters in Blood Wolf Settlement, Khalk Canyon, Sherekhan Necropolis and Tshira Ruins, three of which are your weekly quest zones, so they accumulate while you do the quests. The Peridot Leaf is a questing problem - 200 of the 300 come from the Kamasylvia main quest line, with the rest from Kamasylvia and Grana daily quests. If you skipped Kamasylvia, that is the hidden prerequisite, and it is not on any pity track.

Second, Atanis' Element has one route that is once per Family. The Season Server graduation chain - Fughar's Aid and the Operation Monster Subjugation quests - has historically handed out 100 Atanis' Element, which is a full material's worth of pity pieces, and the Season server route is the single largest shortcut in the potion grind. Note that the September 23 patch retired several Leveling Aid quests, so verify that route is still open in your region before you plan a build around it.

The two treasures eating the same drops

Here is the conflict no Codex screen will show you, and it is the most expensive mistake in the treasure system. Lafi Bedmountain's Upgraded Telescope needs three telescope parts, and one of them can be obtained by taking three compass parts to the scholar Ulubala in Ulukita and trading them. The Compass - the other treasure - needs three compass parts, and they come from the same two zones: Aakman Temple and Hystria Ruins.

The two treasures are drawing from one pile. Every compass part you hand to Ulubala is a part not going into the Compass, and because the Compass needs all three types while Ulubala's exchange takes three of a specific type, the exchange can actively delay your Compass rather than merely compete with it. If you want both, finish the Compass first and trade spare parts afterwards. If you want only one, decide before you start farming Aakman and Hystria - because the Codex will happily track both and never mention that they are fighting.

The Telescope has a second strike against it. It teleports you to an online party or guild member with a 10-hour cooldown, and it cannot be used during Node War or Conquest War, in the Red Battlefield, in prison, with mounts other than horses, camels or donkeys, or while carrying trade goods. That is a long list of the exact situations in which you would want it. The Compass - a permanent compass for the desert and ocean that also pulls another Adventurer to your position - is the more useful half of the pair, and it is the one to finish.

What to start, and the two hard skips

Cut by player type. New and returning players should do the six weekly quests and nothing else: two permanent potions in 20 weeks of ordinary grinding is the best long-term return available, and the quests double as a tour of Kamasylvia and Drieghan. Mid-game players should do the same, plus the Archaeologist's Map if travel annoys them - it has no pity system, but its two zones are old and cheap to run and the four gems are a straightforward market purchase. Endgame players with nothing left to upgrade should finish the Compass first, then route spare parts to the Telescope. The Rich Merchant's Ring is worth chasing only if you already sell heavily on the Central Market, and understand that its recipe is a community puzzle rather than documentation - treat any guide claiming an exact material list with suspicion.

And two hard skips. The Lumaloft Lamp needs Faelight Fragment x4 and Lumentrace x1 from Imperial Horse Delivery; community-datamined rates put Faelight Fragment at 0.1% from a Tier 6 horse, 0.25% from Tier 7 and 0.5% from Tier 8, while Lumentrace comes only from delivering Imperial Steeds, which cannot be bought and must be bred. At 0.5%, four fragments is 800 Tier 8 deliveries in expectation, before you begin breeding for the Lumentrace. If you do not already run a Peridot Forest Path Wagon overnight, the lamp is not a goal - it is a lifestyle. Star of Nostos is the second skip for anyone who does not gather: 6,000 gathering procs for a 30-minute residence teleport.

One honest caveat on this section. The potion and treasure material requirements come from Pearl Abyss's Adventurer's Guide and the September 23 patch notes, but the Imperial Horse Delivery percentages are community-sourced, and Pearl Abyss does not publish most treasure drop rates. Where a number is not official, treat it as an estimate and confirm it in game.

The rest of the September 23 patch

Two other changes from the same patch are worth knowing, and neither is treasure-related. Barter and sailing got a quality-of-life pass that ocean players have wanted for years: you can now use wharf functions without disembarking from a large ship, including chat, accepting and completing quests, shops, equipment repair, mount stat recovery, and the wharf's Repair and Supply, Manage Sailors and Load Cargo functions. Barter Information now shows the distance to each route, adds a Nearby Town or Wharf button that sets navigation directly, and you can sell storage items from the Load Cargo UI. Ship auto-navigation was also adjusted to stop routing you into terrain. The two exclusions are worth remembering: conversation, mount check-in and remote collection still require you to be on land.

The other change is a competitive one. Guild alliances can no longer be formed while a guild is signed up for a Node War. If you run a guild, that closes a long-standing workaround, and it is the kind of rule change that quietly reshuffles who can ally with whom in the middle of a season. It is a small line in the patch notes with a large effect on how the top of the guild ladder is organised.

The bottom line

Do the six weekly quests every week and ignore the rest of the Codex until the potions are done. The patch did not make treasures easier - it made them visible, and visibility is enough to show that only two of the ten have a finish line you can actually see.

The Treasure Codex is a good addition and a slightly misleading one. It finally puts the whole treasure system on one screen, it auto-fills the combination pouch that people used to get wrong, and it keeps a permanent record of when you finished each one - all genuinely useful. But its progress bar counts only the drops you cannot buy, so it will show you a flat 0% while you are objectively making progress, and it will never warn you that your Compass and your Telescope are eating the same materials.

So use it the way it is actually useful: as a checklist for the two treasures that deserve one. Twenty weeks of weekly quests buys you both infinite potions, the lesser versions keep you playing while you wait, and nothing in the September 23 patch changed that arithmetic. Everything else in the Codex is a project you should start on purpose, with the gate named, or not at all.